The last scene in QUEI LORO INCONTRI at the end of the five dialogs follows the unwavering stare of the hunter who has fallen quiet. What is he staring at? At the silent image that is to come. The gods have spoken and everything they have said is echoed in the silence. The last take shows the dry streambed and then pans slowly towards the road, where a man is passing by on his scooter. Will the camera pause so that we can see him crossing the screen? It’s left to chance. A roll of the dice: the camera crosses the horizontal course of the scooter as though it had been thrown vertically into the air and marks the encounter with a brief pause. Then the camera continues to rise, stopping at a power line that cuts across the image, separating the earth from the sky. The blue cannot fill the screen. Beneath the line that divides the image the landscape remains. If the camera continued its upward travel, we would drown in the view. But we have gone as high as we can go. We have understood. We remain with the landscape and the experience of tristesse, as Cesare Pavese puts it: “But they wouldn’t be men if they weren’t miserable.” (Jean-Claude Rousseau)